Forbidden Spheres, by Andy Pickford

Forbidden Spheres

by Andy Pickford

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1.	Liminal Freefall 07:49	buy track
2.	Plato's Box 07:18	buy track
3.	Quarklight 05:35	buy track
4.	Zak The Juggler 07:08	buy track
5.	Forbidden Spheres no.1 09:26
6.	Forbidden Spheres no.2 11:16
7.	Forbidden Spheres no.3 10:08
8.	Forbidden Spheres no.4 09:39
9.	Forbidden Spheres no.5 11:30
10.	Forbidden Spheres 16bit FLAC whole album 01:19:53

about

About Forbidden Spheres
I was attracted to forbidden spheres as a concept after seeing a video about something which happened at the Livermore laboratory at Los Alamos California in the early days of the nuclear bomb research stuff in the 1940s. Although my album has well absolutely nothing at all to do with that it was the concept of the phrase “forbidden spheres” that I was actually attracted to and of course in my vivid imagination this can pertain to many things as you can probably see from the artwork included. Apparently it can mean a lot of things so it’s been a right old playground. There's pretty 14-page PDF with an illustrated expanded text section, 11 HD wallpaper images, the cover image and a label file for making CDs. Lots of shiny things this time.

I worked pretty much in the same way as I had on my previous album Exospore. Particularly on the Forbidden Spheres pieces themselves what I have done is set up my Moog Subharmonicon and done a couple of run-throughs with that as an improvisation. What is different this time however is I seem to have acquired one of those fancy plug-ins which extract the midi data from the audio sound. This produces some really interesting results I found because the Subharmonicon for all it’s simplicity does actually build up a metric shit ton of resonant harmonics which when extracted into midi data results in a very large number of notes being generated over a very wide number of octaves in some cases and when you assign vast long pad sounds to these notes you can get quite an impressive result I found. Although of course you have to make sure your synthesiser is capable of handling so many notes and so I rather happily used Omnisphere, or sadly, depending on your inner-synth guide. I was able to assign it as many notes as I wanted to then just let it happily chug away getting ever larger and larger using the mixer section to build up and build down those sounds. Wow, really impressive, man. In order to give this album some kind of continuity to make it sound very consistent I kind of went on a rediscovery of the old gated reverb sound made famous by proper fossils. I found interesting new ways to make it sound big and slow and bombastic. It somewhat needed to since the backdrop was already quite wall-like. Of course I could have just left it as an all-Moog Sub thing but you know I’m really not that much of an artisan and the punk in me always compels me to include something inherently obscene deep down in there. So no; big sounds love more big sounds which, in turn deserve drums as large as my balls for putting it all together and trying to make it sound clever.   Let's have a look at the album track by track now. Have another coffee.

Liminal Freefall.
This would've been the first track after doing the five Forbidden Spheres pieces really. And in many ways it’s Forbidden Spheres no.6. As it would be. Like its predecessors it is a Moog Subharmonicon improvisation at its very heart. Although it does seem to have a more catchy melody and a light feeling in general. And with it sounding I would say more in keeping with the electronica side of things that I am more known for doing I thought why not use this is the opening track for the album eh. Familiarity is I suppose safe ground. Thus I took it, and the three tracks which come after it, in a different direction. That’s my attention span for you.

Plato's Box.
Yeah okay the title has nothing to do with the piece it's one of my strange random choices of things which come into my slightly addled brain. I suppose the whole thing if I were to think hard enough, came from this Atlantis thing of Plato’s which has always made me wonder if his imagination wasn't somehow compromised by information which was already many thousands of years old by the time he got hold of it and perhaps he wasn't really thinking out of the box. Hence Plato's box. So there you go. But generally as mother has Ancient Aliens on TV all afternoon I’ll get an expert commentary on whichever place or artefact they’re featuring whether I want it or not. Philomena Cunk has nothing on my mother. Musically I think there are two influences here, coffee and another one.  
Quarklight.
This is one of those with a particularly nice melody over a very nice haunting chord structure which all put together is very nice. At least I can be relied on to knock out some pretty tunes. Rather weirdly this whole thing came to me as one of those like strange psychic requests where I sort of think oh I really would like to compose a track that goes just like this… and guess what, it just came through just like that. I've never asked who cooks my pizza on a Saturday night from the takeout down the road, so meh. Don’t think my outboard gear played much role in this piece.

Zak The Juggler.
Some kind of osmium density techno this is. It is loud dense low heavy and in your face. Yes it is believe it or not based upon a Moog Subharmonicon improvisation which helps form that massive low wall of synth on this piece. But then it goes through my noddle filter and ultimately ends up being just like this. I don't think my mother could ever work me out either so don't worry about it. I mean I could just stick a waltz over it instead, or a light rumba beat. Some c**t might like it, just not this one.

Forbidden Spheres no.1
And the first piece of this album session. The idea at this point was to try to make something quite like the previous album Exospore. Where it started going slightly awry was when I employed use of one of those midi from audio sound plug-ins which basically converted every note every resonant harmonic from the Moog into midi notes. The result was really an awful lot of notes spread out across several octaves of harmonics and it sounded pretty impressive with something like a Mellotron choir sound. And then a string orchestra sound. And then a brass pad sound. You can see where this was going. So unsurprisingly I ended up with a really massive sound and so I thought I think I might need some really massive drums. Thus it is really massive and yeah… I can live with that, thought I, let’s make a few more.

Forbidden Spheres no.2
Well this is largely a continuation of the style of the first piece but with variations and this time there is a melody which has been brought forward. So essentially it's another piece which has been created around an improvisation. The rhythm of these is almost a kind of trap beat but it's not it doesn't really have that kind of contemporary feel more an electronica feel but that's me isn't it. Besides, that kind of beat is what dudes like me were hearing when playing Pink Floyd LPs at 16rpm in 1978. Now why on earth I’d want to do that is truly beyond comprehension particularly as the hardest stuff I was on was Shandy Bass.

Forbidden Spheres no.3
You know there always seems to be that part of an Andy Pickford album where everything just goes completely tits up. Well this is probably it. It does underneath it all carry on in the same dense massive semi analog semi orchestral manner. But then I went and gave it a jungle beat because well, reasons. No, even I don’t know them. Look, it gets tedious out here in the garage so I like something I can jiggle to my chair. If I didn’t I’d calcify. 

Forbidden Spheres no.4
And suddenly I seem to have remembered my melodic side once again. This piece is in 6/8 time. It chugs along at a sort of mid tempo with a very in-yer-grill beat and then we've got a particularly catchy melody which is really I think the thing which steers this piece. I couldn't resist adding that little bit at the end it just sort of felt right if you know what I mean which you probably don’t. Overall yes I like this one too, it’s quite a good chair-jiggling thing. I even started tapping my feet to it. Maybe I should inform my GP about that.

Forbidden Spheres no.5
And we're back to the super heavy plutonium trap aka. OG rock beats at 16rpm. Or more like what it would be if you put somebody who produces that stuff on tramadol for three weeks. But that's really just referring to the tempo and the rhythm. In reality it is super heavy electronica of course it is. Add one particularly haunting brass line and there you go. Yeah actually any of you remember the last piece from Tomita’s album Bermuda Triangle? You don’t. Well I’ve had that brass sound in my head forever. It kinda re-emerges here as something of an unholy juxtaposition of sounds.

I will say that when you produce this really dense heavy electronica you're dealing with three lines of Moog Sub then all of the notes that were generated when you converted all of that to midi, fed through very fat sounds like Mellotron choirs and string orchestras and brass sections and stuff like that and if that wasn't enough then you've got things like Eventide Blackhole being used as some massive cosmic reverb. It’s quite some conglomeration of heavy elements and you certainly get a wall of sound just from that alone. So when thinking what percussive sounds might actually match up to that you soon realise that’s all got to be pretty massive too. Ones of these days I’ll produce something light and minimal and you’ll all want your money back. Seriously I should, shouldn’t I?

credits

released March 1, 2023

(Dolby Atmos Binaural as of Oct 16 2023)
The whole album was recorded between January-February 2023 at AP’s Garage. Pro-Tools was used as the DAW of choice and a myriad of synths from Moog Subharmonicon, Buttringer Model D, Krog MS-20 and Spectrasodits Omnisphere were employed for the music. The results provided to you are all at 24bit except for the 16bit whole file of course. Everything was ruined, as usual my be and the cats did their level best to all win Grammies with their expert random choices of button pushing and keyboard bombing.
Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gshiA7iHWEg

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about

Andy Pickford Derby, UK

I make immersive synth music, create my own art, eat, drink, shit and exist. I'm not famous but everybody knows my name... like shingles.

andypickford.uk

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